


Perennial

by Hedgi



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen, Introspection, all aboard the pain train, death-mention, reaction fic to Iris learning what barry saw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-09-20 20:36:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9513134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hedgi/pseuds/Hedgi
Summary: That night, Iris thinks about what Barry saw, and what it means for her. For the future she may not have. How long is 'enough'?





	

_ “Tell me, what else should I have done? _ _   
_ _ Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? _ _   
_ _ Tell me, what is it you plan to do _ _   
_ _ With your one wild and precious life?” _ _   
_ __ ~Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

 

Barry is asleep beside her, breath and heartbeat slow. She can’t wake him, not when this is the first night in weeks that he’s not trembling and twitching in his sleep, fighting demons in dreams and screaming when he fails. So she listens to his heartbeat, staring up at a blank, white ceiling, no glow in the dark stars or patches of discoloration where the roof leaked. This is home. She should feel safest of anywhere here, even if this home is a new one.    
  
But she doesn’t, and she can’t, not knowing what has been haunting Barry’s night terrors. It’s not his mother and the man in yellow, or his father and the blue lightning. It’s her. This time he’s not seeing the past, things too solid to change, but the future. But how can they know for certain that anything they do will change that vision enough? What if this is like that myth she had to read for freshman English her first semester in college--or was it for Humanities? The Road to Samara, or something. The man who sees Death and tries to leave the city, and it turns out Death was waiting on the road all along. What if this is the road she’s walking? 

 

She’s not some sheltered child, some delicate flower in a greenhouse, no matter how her father has acted. Her mother died twice, once in essence, once for real. She stood in a blue dress by Barry’s side, 11 years old, the winter morning they buried Nora. She did not get to bury Eddie. In the last three years, she’s seen too much death, faced it too many times to not be aware of Life’s one promise: it doesn’t last forever. 

 

There’s no avoiding it: everyone dies. But it’s one thing to know that everyone dies, that she will die someday, and a different thing to know that it’s coming, and coming soon. Four months. They have--she has--four months, unless something changes. And for all Barry’s desperate promises, she knows that when those four months are up, they might be up. Even thinking it makes her chest go tight, her hands numb. Barry couldn’t save his mother, or his father, for all he tried. As much as she wants that hope, she has to admit it here, quietly, to herself and no one else--what’s the point of demoralizing the team--all these plans, all the changes they make, may not change what Barry saw. Maybe they’ll lead to it, or maybe it’ll just happen. She doesn’t want to think of it, but she does anyway. 

 

Four months. Iris can see the calendar hanging on the wall, with different photographs of wild birds for each month. January’s chickadees hang there, captured and still, and below them she knows is February, a robin, and March’s wrens, and April’s something, and May’s little goldfinch. June was hummingbirds, she remembers, the same image from the cover of the calendar, the reason she’d bought it. Golden and tawny and rust colored, Allen’s hummingbirds, and Barry had laughed and still bought the calendar with garden shots, to tack to the wall in the lab, all pansies and daffodils and irises. Four months. 

 

She remembers what Francine, no, what her mother had said, sad and sorry, about how she had months. This wasn’t the same thing, but it was, wasn’t it? Her mother had lain in a hospital bed, dying and knowing it was coming, that she had a fistful of weeks and that would be it. Any regrets and unfinished work would just be left there for whoever was left to scoop together, a jigsaw puzzle with so many missing pieces all there was to do was put it back in the box and look at the cover from time to time. That’s the way it is for everyone, every death.     

 

She’s scared. The others must know it, but still she has to keep that locked down, locked away, because admitting it is like admitting they might not change anything, like admitting that they might lose. But she’s scared, and it’s not the kind of fear the clung to her like a second skin when they found Zoom’s ransom note for Wally or the fear that took hold of her lungs that December night when her father called to say Barry’d been rushed to the hospital, struck by lightning.  It’s closer to  running through STAR Labs when Eddie had left her side and they’d all heard a gunshot. There’s a certainty there that lodges in her throat like a piece of rock, carved and sharp and heavy, like the two rings on the long chain over her heart. She’d taken them both off, angry at Eddie for leaving and her mother for coming back. Now, she wears it again, digging it out of a long packed away box, hiding it like shame. 

 

She wonders what it was like, her mother in that white-washed room with so many wires, Eddie down in that dark space, holding the gun she’d used to save him from Tockman. Did they know, either, what it would be like? Were they scared? As whatever it was took hold, did they have time for anything, last thoughts, regrets? Will they be waiting for her? Cupping those two rings and the chain, she wonders, if it happens, will she be as brave as they were? She wants to think she could be, if they were waiting, if the others are waiting, Grandma Esther and the rest.

 

Of course it’s not certain. It can’t be. Barry would never let that future happen, but Barry’s not a God. Barry can’t stop everything. Sooner or later, everyone dies. 

 

She thinks of all the empty notebooks, lined up on the shelf, pens full of ink, all the things that, if it comes to May 23rd, she’ll never write. All the things she’ll never uncover, all the stories that’ll go unwritten, unheard. She thinks of the spice rack Cisco had given her and Barry, each jar organized for preference, and the book of Grandma Esther’s recipes she still hasn’t mastered. Sixteen weeks isn’t enough time to use all the paprika and saffron and chili-lime blend and tarragon and anise; it’s not enough time to learn the book by heart, the way Grandma had merely needed to take it down and glance at the page remembering how long to boil and broil and bake. It’s not enough time to lie here, beside Barry, to laugh, to watch all the movies Cisco’s told her about, and see all the backroads Wally’s raced down, to try to convince Caitlin to work her way through a bottle of something and a karaoke set-list. There’s so much more she wants to do, wants to be. 

  
Sixteen weeks. Four turns of the calendar pages. Suddenly she wants to get to her feet and rip out the pages between the chickadees and the hummingbirds. She stays where she is, closing her eyes, listening to Barry’s breathing. They might change it, everyone together. They’ve done so many impossible things over the last three years. And if they don’t, if they can’t, then four months will have to be enough, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> I regret nothing


End file.
